Media - 4

The city is increasingly influenced by the broadcasts of the growing numbers of FM radio channels. These channels have mainly targeted and immensely affected the youngsters. One can hear such expressions in every locality of the city, whether it is upmarket Defence and Clifton, middle-class Gulshan-e- Iqbal and North Nazimabad or slums of Liaquatabad, Lyari [...]

Insan Foundation Pakistan (IFP) uses the powerful medium of street theatre to captivate audiences in Delhi with its simple message for peace in the region. The troupe had two plays in its repertoire for Indian audiences. The first play carries a powerful message of peace and is entitled Gall Nikki Jaee (meaning ‘A Small Matter’). [...]

The premise was simple: could a Gora (white man) become a Pakistani? Over 13 weeks, Fulton, a 27-year-old former public schoolboy, travelled the country to find out. He sampled Pakistan’s many delights – moseying through the tribal areas, dancing at slick Karachi parties, speaking bad Urdu and arguing with his electricity company. It turns out [...]

The Domestic Crusaders, a two-act play about Muslim Pakistani Americans is meant to convey a brutally honest, authentic, and no-holds-barred depiction of a family. Three generations of a Muslim American Pakistani family to be exact, featuring an aged grandfather (Dhada Hakim), his immigrant son and his middle aged wife, (Salman and Khulsoom)… The three standing [...]

Devdas is being remade again — this time, in Pakistan, by producer Nadeem Sha and veteran Pakistani director, Iqbal Kashmiri. The budget for Devdas is whopping by Pakistani standards — Rs 10 to 15 crore. The music took a year-and-a-half to compose. ‘The total cost of recording has taken what would have been the budget [...]

Titled Pehlee Dharkan (first heartbeat), the film festival intends to inform audiences and the wider community on what film-making in Pakistan really has to offer. The festival will screen contemporary films from the budding independent cinema movement; have a retrospective of classic Pakistani films; show short films and documentaries on political, environmental and health issues [...]

Andrea Meadows is swapping her Yorkshire tones for Urdu on her first single which she hopes will eventually bring together artists from all over the world. Thanks to dad Cliff Jenkyns she was invited to perform for 8,000 people … “My dad phoned me at work and said ‘can you take next week off? You’re [...]

Movie houses that once saw audiences queue for Pakistan’s home-grown “Lollywood” productions now say they need to screen films made by their once bitter rivals in glitzy Mumbai, the former Bombay, in order to survive. In the golden age of Pakistani cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, four studios in Lahore and two in Karachi [...]

The Pakistan chapter of the UK-based international NGO, Oxfam, has recently begun broadcasting a radio series aimed at raising public awareness of honour killings. Oxfam aims to reduce social acceptance of such killings through a six-year campaign aiming at significantly reducing the number of women killed under the banner of ‘honour’. The twenty-minute programme series, [...]

This film festival is a chance to let people know what film-making in Pakistan really has to offer and by bringing feature films, ocumentaries and shorts to the UK it will offer a unique opportunity to savour the experience of a socially-engaged documentary/art-film sector as well as the entertaining and cultish world of commercial cinema [...]